Saturday, October 13, 2012

The Ampersand, &

This is a false-reveal of the ampersand conflation. The E and T are visible, but the implied origin, sans-stylization, is misleading in regards to the actual evolution of the ampersand character.

The Thing, SEEN

Ampersand - '&'. It means ‘and’, a -conjunction- of
things. It means ‘to combine’, or more like a command to the reader to combine.

Visually, this symbol ‘&’ is a conflation of the letters
‘e’ and ‘t’, for the Latin et, or
‘and’. Firstly, it was joined to form a simple ligature, or combination of
letters typically-found-together. But it further underwent a strange evolution
under the influence of, primarily, scribes, typographers and typesetting
technology. These people/things would abbreviate, combining letters together
(like the ‘ae’ in aesthetics) to save time, space, and money. And it was under
these conditions that the hyper-stylization of the letter/s-form gave it a life
of its own, the combination having reached a point where the constituent
letters could no longer be distinguished from each other. This is what makes a
conflation.

As a word, ampersand is also a conflation. It was originally
spoken/written as and per se and
(which in itself is a combination of English-Latin-English, the Latin part of
which, per se, means ‘in itself’…you
can’t make this stuff up). The other word-letters of the alphabet were spoken I per se and A per se, and they were said that way to distinguish them as
letters and not words (though their very distinguishing in this way made them
words more than letters, in fact).

This time, it was through the copying mechanism of human
speech that the ampersand was carried over multiple iterations, themselves
being reinforced in children reciting the alphabet, and ending with ‘and’, the
27th letter, spoken ‘and per se and’, to distinguish it as a letter of the
alphabet and not a word – andperseand became slurred and stuttered by its
countless iterations until a stable ‘ampersand’ was reached. It doesn’t make
any kind of sense how it got there; it is a conflation in this as well as its
visual expression.

The Wrestling Ampersand

The Idea, UNDERSTOOD

Slightly sideways now; the ampersand, both the word, and its
symbol, stand for a combination of things – they are a combination and they stand
for a combination. It’s put together like an abstract life form. It’s just
uncanny how the ampersand’s meaning is inherent in its form. It’s completely
artificial, and completely beautiful, and who
designed it?

And so finally, the most triumphant expression of this thing
is in our understanding of it. A mental-pretzeling, we wrestle with its
recursions and meta-logic diversions. It is the expression of a mind trying to
understand itself.

"Finding any mention of the sign in the pre-computer
era literature is nearly impossible, because the use of ampersand in Cyrillic
typesetting was very scant."

"There’s no need to use ampersand in Russian.

Because the Russian conjunction u (and) sounds and looks
short enough (with “y”, the Spanish [and 'e' in Spanish and Portuguese] are the
luckiest of the bunch). The author can’t recall an example when one
intelligible and condensed symbol is replaced with a few symbols or even just a
ligature."

Esperluette underwent not identical but very similar
development in France.
Perhaps this can be a focus for studying the relative speed of
idea-transmission at particular points in cultural evolution. Had printed
writing been so prevalent in an older England/France as it is now, then the
word for the thing-ampersand would not have been able to morph so easily.

Now it is fixed. If, for some reason, we were to incorporate
'theisthe' into our language today in the 21st century, it would not mutate the
same (especially since the 'letter of the alphabet' for 'th' is no longer
used) However, it isn't used in many other languages, examples given
below.

via Legend:

one appears in Pompeian graffiti, establishing the symbol at
least as far back as A.D. 79 (we can just take this as legend).

About Me

First things first, that's not a picture of me, although it could be any one of us. It's a painting by Alex Grey.
Next, the blog Limbic Signal is an extension of my book Hidden Scents, and the blog Network Address is a personal archive that I like to keep online for easy access.
Last, I'm a thirty-something male from Suburbia, New Jersey, a high school visual arts instructor, independent researcher, and writer.
Hidden Scents The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation is my first attempt at authoring a work of non-fiction, and serves as a response to the dearth of information on the topic of Smell.